The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is a ubiquitous component in modern electronics and satellite systems. The tradeoff has traditionally been between the speed of conversion, the number of bits and the power consumption. The ADC samples an analog input that is then quantized by a quantizer that can be implemented in a number of ways. A flash converter uses a resistive divider to obtain the quantization. While very fast, the flash converter is limited to a small number of bits of resolution because of size and power constraints. In a successive approximation ADC, a digital approximation of the analog voltage is first obtained with low resolution. Then an internal digital to analog converter generates an analog approximation, which is compared against the input signal to obtain a residual. The residual is then amplified and digitized in a second step to obtain more bits of precision. The successive approximation ADC is slow and requires complex circuitry, including a complete internal digital-to-analog converter. A sigma-delta ADC uses a single comparator in a feedback loop. The sigma-delta ADC has a very high clock rate. The comparator samples the input signal and compares it against a reference value derived from integration of previous samples. The result is a string of binary numbers whose density represents the analog voltage. With additional digital signal processing, this string can be reconstructed into a high-resolution digital signal. The tradeoff is that the high resolution comes at the expense of speed. These conventional ADCs are complex circuits having high power requirements. These and other disadvantages are solved or reduced using the invention.